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Time for Some Traffic Problems… In Your Video Games!

By the Anti-Censorship Committee of the International Game Developers Association

Imagine you are playing an online game. You are so close to victory you can taste it. Suddenly your game starts stuttering and pausing. Triumph turns to bitter defeat. Death by lag.

You call your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to complain about their lousy service. But the support rep cheerfully explains that the lag is not a bug, it’s a feature.

You see, the developers of your game didn’t agree to pay the ISP an extra monthly fee, so the ISP closed most of the lanes carrying the game’s Internet traffic. Instead of playing such a slow game, why don’t you play a game from one of the companies paying extra fees to the ISP? Oh, and you might want to use the online movie site owned by the ISP, because from now on your favorite video site will look like a flipbook.

And by the way, since you called to complain, you have been added to the ISP’s list of problem customers. You’ll have to pay an additional fee or on some days you’ll find traffic cones blocking your high-speed access lanes and your broadband will crawl like dialup.

Did you catch how Verizon limited that to "consumers”? What they fail to say is they won’t change the ability of businesses to access and use the internet without paying additional fees. This is a clear burden to game developers and could be fatal to small independent game companies. Even if you are a game developer in a nation like Israel which passed laws requiring net neutrality, your access to American customers could require payments to all the US ISPs if you don’t want internet traffic problems in your game.

Even the court that overturned net neutrality on a technical point agreed that the FCC should have authority to regulate ISPs, because ISPs "represent a threat to internet openness and could act in ways that would ultimately inhibit the speed and extent of future broadband deployment."

For over a century, this openness has been mandated by law for highways, railroads, canals, and more. These laws also apply to phone networks and have applied to data communications for over 150 years, starting with laws requiring telegraph messages be "impartially transmitted.”

When it comes to roads and bridges, just about everyone in the world recognizes that it is wrong for anyone to deliberately obstruct traffic in for their own benefit. A wide range of groups on the left and right agree that the same rules should apply when the traffic is online, but powerful business interests think that deliberately obstructing traffic for profit is a great idea. The American Civil Liberties Union calls this "one of the foremost free speech issues of our time."